Digiarty Software – WinX DVD Ripper Platinum review

Laws on making backup copies of DVD movies vary throughout the world, but whenever film studios come up with a new form of copy protection for their discs, you can bet that software companies will do their best to crack it.

And that’s the case with WinX DVD Ripper Platinum, a relatively small (8MB) application that can, at its most simple, make copies of your DVD movies from one disc to another. This process is straightforward and quick, with even newer copy-protected DVDs such as Transformers 2, Star Trek and District 9 supported.

Of course, there are times when you may want to backup your DVDs onto different media and in different formats. Here the copyright laws are even more of a legal minefield, so you might want to check local laws before you rip.

But if you so wish, you can configure the program to produce its output according to your specifications: you can choose between XviD and DivX, for example, or change the bit rate, modify the audio characteristics, tweak interlace handling and so on. If none of this works for you, you can also select the ‘safe’ option which should rip your DVD with the minimum of problems.

Output pre-sets are provided for a range of video playback devices, including Apple’s iPod and iPhone, Sony’s PSP plus a generic 3G phone option. These all seem pretty well configured, but you can modify them if they don’t quite suit your needs.

In terms of performance, we compared WinX DVD Ripper Platinum’s ripping power with that of some similar software we reviewed a few years ago, ImTOO DVD Ripper Platinum. Using the same bit-rate, audio format and video compression codec, WinX DVD Ripper Platinum ripped the DVD twice as fast as the competition and generated an output file that was 30 percent smaller.

That’s pretty impressive stuff, but although we couldn’t tell the difference between the two output files at native resolution, scaling up the video produced more artefacts in the output from WinX DVD Ripper Platinum than from the ImTOO software. With a good hardware scaler you probably won’t notice, though.

The only real fly in the ointment was that the audio output wasn’t perfectly synchronised to the video. That may have been a glitch with our test rig, but ImTOO had no such problems on the same machine so it’s worth trying before you buy to make sure the software works properly for you.

A fast, powerful piece of software for ripping DVD movies, including copy-protected ones. Worth a trial, but in the unlikely event that your system's anything like ours it might be worth checking the audio synchronisation is correct before you commit to buying.